Although electric power has many benefits for use in industrial material transport machinery, some of these benefits may be offset by the need to carry, charge and maintain a sufficient source of electric power, e.g., a large battery or other charge storage system. In applications having substantially repeated travel patterns, such as in mine work and other similar contexts, trolley line systems eliminate this problem by providing a path along which a travelling machine may receive electric power from one or more power lines (herein referred to as “trolley lines”). Such trolley lines may be placed continuously along a path, or only at certain portions of the path, such as uphill runs, to provide assist power.
In a trolley system, the source of electrical power, which may be a municipal grid or an on-site generator facility, stays fixed, but the trolley-powered machine nonetheless receives power from the power source anywhere along the trolley lines. As such, the efficiencies of electric power may be obtained when needed without the concomitant complications and expense of large batteries. However, one significant limitation of trolley systems is that the trolley-powered machine must track the trolley lines if it is to receive power there from. In a related vein, the apparatus for electrically connecting the trolley-powered machine to the trolley lines, called a “pantograph,” must be raised when the trolley line is to be used, and lowered at other times.
Taking into account the above requirements, the use of a trolley system requires the machine operator to both follow the trolley line accurately and to raise and lower the pantograph at the appropriate locations. Failure to meet either requirement can result in a loss of efficiency, since alternative power such as an onboard engine must be used when the trolley-powered machine is not receiving power from the trolley line. Moreover, misdirection of the machine or the pantograph can result in damage to the machine as well as to the trolley line and associated infrastructure, e.g., lines, line poles, transformers, etc.
While various aides have been developed to assist the operator in following the trolley line and appropriately raising and lowering the pantograph, the chore of operating the machine remains one that encourages fatigue and distraction for the operator. Certain systems have been developed to automate some types of industrial machine operation, but such solutions do not address numerous important problems present in the context of a trolley-driven machine. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 6,195,610 by Kaneko, entitled “Teaching Method and Apparatus and Unmanned Vehicle Travelling Course” (hereinafter “Kaneko”) discloses dividing a course into zones and conducting a teaching process for each zone. However, there is no accommodation in Kaneko for an operator and the actions of the operator once a machine is in the automatic mode. Indeed, course corrections when in automatic mode must be made by the system and not the operator as noted at Kaneko 15:20 et seq. (“ . . . When the dump truck 3 further travels automatically by dead reckoning, and passes by the other one of the aforementioned pair of correcting poles 4, the controller 20 obtains the distance . . . Thereby the current position and the traveling direction which are computed by dead reckoning are corrected, and automatic traveling by dead reckoning is conducted thereafter in the same way as in the above.”). Moreover, the unmanned machines of Kaneko are not trolley-powered, and so there is no disclosure of a system to accommodate the lateral location, starting location and stopping locations of trolley lines, and so on.
It will be appreciated that this background section was created by the inventors for the reader's convenience. It is meant to discuss problems and concepts noted by the inventors, and not to discuss or explain prior art unless expressly otherwise noted. Thus the inclusion of any problem or solution in this section is not an indication that the problem or solution is prior art.